She pulled her hair from her face—we were waiting until just before school started to get it cut—and touched her earlobes. I knew what was coming. “Mom,” she said.
I stood behind her. “Will you be the only one without them pierced?” I said, thinking: would it help?
“Not the only one,” she said.
Dennis had always said we didn’t have to worry about Margo becoming an actress—her expression always gave her away. In the dressing room, her face showed that she was highly alert, like an animal sensing a predator. She wasn’t fearful, exactly—she was anxious, as if she knew in her bones that anything could happen. “I have one condition,” I said.
She started hopping in place.
“You’re not going to like it,” I said. She stopped hopping. “New bras,” I said. “Plus a fitting.”
She considered her options, then reached for her old clothes. “Let’s go.”
As we wound through the store toward the lingerie department, I spotted a pair of jeans made of bright red velveteen. At most, she’d be able to wear them four or five weeks during the winter—but they were adorable. “What about these?” I said.
She eyed the pants and made me move out of the way. “Cool,” she said, touching them, and moments later in the dressing room, admiring her long legs and little tummy in the mirror, I was unable to keep from admitting that I loved them, too.
For the bra fitting, a diminutive older woman prodded Margo onto a platform in front of a triptych of mirrors. To Margo, she said, “Arms up, dear,” and Margo raised her arms while the rest of her body folded in. The woman looped a measuring tape around her torso and muttered a number. When she took the tape away, Margo tugged on her shirt and headed for the exit. If she’d been thirteen, she might have been glad to learn that she’d grown an inch in the rib cage, thereby earning the right to leave training bras behind forever.
“My turn,” I said, stepping onto the platform. I tried to sound lighthearted. For someone my age being fitted was like stepping onto a scale after years: who knows what might have transpired? Margo sighed and clutched a shopping bag to her chest. The woman unwound her measuring tape. “I thought I was a thirty-four C,” I said, “but it couldn’t hurt to make sure.”
When I saw myself reflected in the mirrors, my first thought was that I did not look half bad. I’d lost weight over the past three or four years. It was only about ten pounds, but maybe the fashion of the times flattered me, and maybe height was in style, because my self-esteem was up. That was how I thought of it, how I think of it stilclass="underline" a wave I ride until it abates. I can divvy my life into phases with regard to how I felt about my looks at the time: good years, bad years, so-so years; years of no makeup, years of no jewelry, years of some of each. In good years, I looked at myself in the mirror more often and criticized my body parts—flabby upper arms, too-wide hips—because in those times, the problem areas seemed discrete and fixable, as if all I needed was a few lunges or a few laps in the pool.
But—and here is where I pat my parenting on the back—appearance was not a fourth family member in my house, didn’t pull up a chair and sit with us at mealtimes, peering at our plates. In this, I followed Dennis’s lead: more handsome every year, ten pounds up or down depending on nothing more than whether the Dolphins had made it to the play-offs or how many times he had gone for a run. When he wasn’t working, Dennis wore baggy blue jeans and deck shoes with no laces. He used his fingers for a comb, and when he saw himself in a mirror, he smiled. “Hey, man,” he’d say to his reflection when he passed the full-length mirror that hung at the end of the hallway off our bedroom. “What’s happening, dude?”
I’d hoped Margo might watch my fitting as I’d watched hers, making some meaningful connection between bra fittings and womanhood. Instead, she wandered into a corner of the room and stood in front of another mirror. She brought her hand to the top of her head and started patting, then brought the other hand to her stomach and started to rub in circles. Patting and rubbing, patting and rubbing. Inevitably, the motions became confused, and by the time my new bra size was announced—thirty-six B, to my surprise—she’d grown frustrated and turned away.
It hadn’t occurred to me to confer with Dennis before negotiating with Margo on the matter of her ears. After the piercing was all done, I dabbed away the droplets of blood from the tiny gold studs she’d chosen, and thought she looked rather cute. At dinner that night, Dennis leaned over his meat loaf to push her hair from her face. “What the hell?” he said to me. “Did you know about this?”
“I forgot to tell you,” I said. He’d spent the day at the marina and come home late, and we’d scheduled an after-dinner modeling session so Margo could show off her new outfits.
“It’s OK, Dad,” said Margo.
“I don’t agree,” he said.
“I’m in sixth grade now,” she said.
I flinched. Dennis went back to eating, but it was clear that he was upset. Margo and I talked awkwardly about her soccer coach, who’d complimented her speed on the field and moved her from fullback to halfback, and about what she could do to welcome Carla home from Massachusetts, where her family had spent the summer. We decided to make a card and leave it in the mailbox for Carla to find when she arrived home. When I went to clear the plates, Dennis left the table without helping. The front door opened and closed. I pushed a glass of milk toward Margo and sent her to watch television in our room, and the phone rang.
It was Bette. “What’s in that yam dish?” she said when I answered. “Rum?”
“Bourbon,” I said.
“Can I make it with rum?”
“I suppose.”
“You sound tired.”
“Not really,” I said, but then I found myself rubbing my eyes, as Margo had done when she was a little girl. I told Bette about our afternoon at the mall, the bra fitting and the ear piercing. “Dennis is brooding,” I said.
“You worry too much,” she said.
An hour later I circled our block, looking for Dennis. When I got back to the house, he was sitting on the front steps holding a can of beer. He must have rooted behind stacks of yogurts and sodas and vegetables to find the beer in the refrigerator; I hadn’t even known we had any. Our stocks were thinning with each week that Dennis was unemployed. I seized over every purchase, every small distinction in price.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He didn’t say anything.
“Please don’t get gloomy,” I said. “We’re depending on you.”
“I could’ve used a little warning.”
“I was ambushed,” I said.
“Self-mutilation, rite of passage. Shit.”
“Oh, honey,” I said. “I just want her to be happy.”
He took several long draws from his beer and set it down with an empty clang. “It’s not looking good out there, Frances,” he said. “I feel like a slob.”
It was mid-August. Dennis had been out of work for eight months. He’d been on five interviews: two with the University of Miami, two with consulting firms, and one with the parks department. He’d sent out many, many résumés. Friends and colleagues called regularly with news of an opening at this or that law firm, but Dennis always declined. Lately, though, it had sounded as if the possibility of returning to law was back on the table. I wasn’t sure which I feared more: Dennis not finding a job as our funds dribbled to nothing, or Dennis taking a job he wouldn’t like. “You’re not a slob,” I said.
“I feel useless.”
“You’re definitely not useless.”